Donnerstag, 5. Januar 2006

There have been some suggestions for improvements of the Intypo plugin in the last days. So I think I would be helpful if I tell you, what my plans are.

Improve the quotation mark detection
There are several cases, when Intypo does not correctly recognise whether it is the beginning or the end of a quote, e.g. if marks are accompanied by brackets, commas, etc. or by HTML-tags: eg. "<em>quote</em>" won’t work.

Include more languages/countries
For efficiency, I started with quotation styles used in more than one country. I will add some other languages, as far as they are mentioned in Forssman/de Jong’s Detailtypografie.

Multi-language support
Some blogs use more than one language for the postings. Or maybe you quote some text in a different language. Elegant typography requires to set foreign language quotations in the way used for that language. I think it would be best to use the HTML/XHTML standard for language markup, i.e. the lang and xml:lang attribute. (Usage of both tags is recommended in XHTML 1 specification.)
So future Intypo should allow you to set one language as standard. (And it should suggest the language of your WordPress installation.)
As many languages allow either the use of commas or of guillemets, there should be a second option, »prefer commas (if appropriate for specified languages)« or »prefer guillemets (if appropriate…)«.
Then, if you have a portion of text in a different language than the standard you set, you have to add the lang attribute to the HTML element containing your text. This means, if for example you have German text in a blockquote (and a different language is your standard), you type<blockquote lang="de">Er sagte: "Guten Tag!"</blockquote>If your portion of text is not surrounded by a HTML element, you could use div or span as usual.
An additional advantage of this soulution would be, that it if future webbrowsers will be able to use the correct quotation marks depending on language attributes (as suggested by W3C), your WordPress postings are ready for it.

Language information specified via the lang attribute may be used by a user agent to control rendering in a variety of ways. Some situations where author-supplied language information may be helpful include:

As far as I know, current browsers don’t include these features, but if they will, you simply could tun off Intypo. (To be honest, I don’t know if there will be need for some of the Intypo features left.)

Select, what should be affected
It was just a mistake that I forgot to include the comments in what is filtered by Intypo. (Thanks, Andreas, for telling me.) But in fact, it would be better if the Intypo options page offers checkboxes that let you decide, what Intypo should filter: the text, the excerpt, the title, the comments, maybe the RSS-feeds…
And vice versa, I want an option to turn off quotation mark replacement for <code> sections. I should check if this could be combinded with existing syntax highlighting plugins.